Classifying real estate by category, or by theme, is an imperfect art. This is particularly true for the buildings and environments designed to support science and technology businesses, which are often grouped under the term “life sciences real estate”, which I would describe as clumsy shorthand.
Most of us delivering the infrastructure needed for innovation know that this is an unfit definition. Life sciences as a catch-all label bundles together occupier types with very distinct operational needs. It is also reductive. The diversity of research and development in established knowledge clusters cannot be so easily simplified.
Cities such as Oxford and Cambridge in the United Kingdom are high-intensity multisector science and technology clusters, regarded as much for their transformative contributions to areas such as tech, artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, quantum computing, and advanced materials, as they are for life sciences. This follows the diversity o
